From Inspiration to Execution: How Purpose Meets Process at the Edge of Growth

This article is part of the Serenichron Business Insights Series, where we chat with smart professionals, entrepreneurs, and decision-makers about what’s working, what’s not, and where things are headed in their world. These conversations are designed to shine a light on real business journeys, the messy, evolving, and often inspirational stories behind organizations doing meaningful work.

In this edition, we spoke with Anand Mistry, co-founder of  ProjectCHAKRA. Based in the UK, Anand is building a business rooted in social impact and experiential learning for young people. But this isn’t a typical education venture. 

ProjectCHAKRA was born from a deeply personal journey that began with a life-changing leadership program in India and has since evolved into a vehicle for systemic change and youth empowerment.

ProjectCHAKRA connects academia, corporate learning, and community development through immersive workshops that encourage self-awareness, empathy, and critical thinking. The goal? Equip the next generation to become changemakers in a world that desperately needs them.

Anand’s work stems from a deep commitment to growth, both personal and collective. In our conversation, we dug into the origins of his journey, how ProjectCHAKRA started, the current challenges of scaling a purpose-led organization, and the balancing act between meaning and momentum.

Opening new paths for young changemakers

Anand didn’t start his career chasing traditional success. Instead, at age 17, he took a leap of faith and traveled to India to attend a service-based leadership program. It wasn’t part of any academic curriculum, and he didn’t quite know what to expect. But what he found there was a new definition of leadership, one that fused practical service with emotional intelligence, and action with deep human connection. That experience planted the seed for what would later become ProjectCHAKRA.

“It really got me interested in, I guess, social impact-related work… it broadened my horizons beyond what I could see.”

This instinct toward hands-on learning wasn’t just personal, it’s backed by research. 

Studies show that experiential learning enhances knowledge retention, motivation, and additional skill development through hands-on activities and real-world experiences. 

It’s like the difference between reading about riding a bike and actually wobbling down the street with scraped knees and a massive grin. The real learning happens when you’re doing, not just thinking.

Through hands-on service and meaningful relationships, Anand began to understand that real learning happens when people are immersed in situations that challenge their assumptions. 

This led him to reimagine what education could look like. Instead of lectures and theory, why not bring the real world into the classroom? Why not create environments where students learn by engaging with global issues?

He returned to university in the UK with a new vision. He started a local social enterprise, spent a year studying abroad, and eventually returned to India to intern with the same social organization, now in partnership with the United Nations Development Programme. 

It was during this time that he developed his first experiential learning workshop, a simulation on urban waste management in India. Despite the lack of funding and resources, it took off.

“That workshop then went on to be recognised as one of the world’s leading innovative experiences, basically.”

ProjectCHAKRA launched shortly after, starting with universities as their first clients. They created workshops that tackled real-world problems, using gamified simulations and immersive design. 

Later, they began experimenting with workshops tailored for corporate clients, introducing team building, leadership development, and social awareness to workplace learning.

“We design and run these experiential learning experiences… that aim to inspire the next generation of changemakers.”

What began as a spark during one summer in India evolved into a bridge between academia, corporate culture, and social change. These workshops are now helping young people and professionals alike see leadership not as a title, but as a way of engaging with the world more fully.

Small crew, big vision

Running ProjectCHAKRA is a lean operation. Anand and his co-founder are the core team. Everything else runs on a network of trained facilitators and freelance collaborators.

“It’s me and my co-founder. And then we have a lot of supporters and people that we can lean upon when we need to bring them in for that particular context and time.”

Their approach mirrors what researchers call a team-based experiential instructional strategy, which provides platforms for students to apply business concepts and practice communication skills in low-threat environments. 

It’s clever, rather than building a massive corporate structure, they’ve created a network that can flex and adapt. Like having a Swiss Army knife instead of a full toolbox.

This structure allows for agility. It lets them scale up or down depending on the project at hand, without the financial burden of maintaining a large permanent staff. It’s a sensible approach for a young organization still exploring its full model. But it comes with trade-offs.

The freelance nature of their support team means availability isn’t always guaranteed. Training someone new each time, especially for an immersive and nuanced learning experience, can be time-consuming and inconsistent. It also risks affecting the quality and continuity of the experience ProjectCHAKRA is trying to deliver.

“There have been occasions where it’s been a struggle to find the right facilitator… as we scale, I think the scale will bring the opportunity to maybe have the more reliable people.”

Anand is balancing the demands of ProjectCHAKRA with other personal and professional responsibilities. Despite their ambitions, the reality is that the business has only been running at half its potential energy.

“The efforts we’ve put into the business have been, you know, 40 to 50% of our capacity.”

If they want to deliver consistent quality and take on more work, they’ll eventually need to invest in building a more stable core team and formalizing recruitment, training, and delivery processes. Right now, they’re doing the best they can with the capacity they have, but they’re clear-eyed about what that means.

Growing into the unknown

When we asked Anand about his strategy for scale, he spoke with clarity and honesty about the current state of their operations and the direction they are headed.

“We’re still figuring out what the business model actually looks like for things to scale impact.”

The past few years have brought valuable opportunities their way, largely through word-of-mouth and trusted networks. This organic growth reflects the strong relationships and real impact that ProjectCHAKRA has created so far.

“Everything that’s happened in the past two years has not happened as a result of proactive efforts by us.”

Now, Anand and his team are actively exploring how to transition from that reactive mode to a more proactive, strategic phase of development. They are looking at ways to build scalable systems that align their mission with business performance, developing clear revenue models, refining their customer experience, and structuring their corporate partnerships to better support youth-focused initiatives.

“If you can’t see your strategy, you can’t execute it.”

The ambition is not only to increase reach but to ensure every new partnership strengthens the broader vision. There’s a real opportunity to formalize the link between corporate and educational impact, and to develop a system where commercial success directly empowers social progress.

“We’re still trying to get to that stage where it feeds and loops back into the work that we do with young people.”

As they move into this next chapter, the team is thinking more critically about how structure can amplify purpose. Their roadmap includes not just growing the number of workshops, but designing a sustainable model where revenue, impact, and values work hand in hand.

Energy, capacity, and the quiet cost of doing everything

One theme that emerged was the challenge of capacity. ProjectCHAKRA is a labor of love. But it also exists alongside other personal demands, which means progress happens in sprints rather than steady rhythms.

“I’ve given 40% of myself to this.”

That feeling of partial investment, not for lack of passion but due to life’s constraints, is familiar to many entrepreneurs. It’s the quiet cost of juggling ambition with responsibility. When your time is split across various roles, founder, facilitator, strategist, and human being—prioritizing becomes a game of survival.

And when there are no clear systems in place, that juggling act becomes harder. Without metrics, how do you know what’s working? Without tracking, how do you plan? 

Anand shared that while there are efforts to capture data through pre- and post-surveys, and a few documented case studies, there is still a lack of structured insight into the long-term effects of their work.

“For those that we continue to work with, continue to support, we have these case study examples.”

Quantitative data isn’t the current focus, but it’s part of the horizon. For institutional funders, partners, and corporate clients, being able to present outcomes in numbers, alongside stories, can make the impact more tangible. Anand recognizes this and sees it as a valuable next step in their growth journey.

Introducing systems for time tracking, participant feedback, or project pipeline management won’t change the heart of ProjectCHAKRA’s work, but it will give them more tools to communicate, refine, and replicate their impact. The story stands strong on its own, adding structure just gives it the reach and rhythm it needs to grow.

Impact versus infrastructure

The idea of growth includes both the drive for greater impact and the need for infrastructure to support it. In our conversation, we explored how even a successful social enterprise needs the same structural thinking as any other business: funnels, cycles, data, systems.

“All of that assumes that the demand is there. Doesn’t it?”

It was a simple question, but an essential one. Without the demand, all the systems in the world won’t help. But when demand does arrive, if you’re not ready, you lose the opportunity. It’s a tightrope.

That’s why we talked about proactive strategy. About what it means to design for growth, not just react to it. And why it’s worth investing in documentation, pipelines, and ways of turning moments of inspiration into repeatable systems.

“The moment when you don’t have the project, you shouldn’t be looking at the screen thinking, ‘I’m not sure what to work on.'”

During our conversation, Anand brought up a few exciting possibilities that could shape ProjectCHAKRA’s evolution. One idea was expanding their footprint in corporate settings, not just for revenue, but as a way to expose more professionals to social learning and systems thinking. Another was building thematic learning journeys that span multiple workshops or locations, allowing participants to go deeper into issues like climate, inequality, or urban planning.

They’re also exploring partnerships with universities and international NGOs that share a vision for immersive education. These collaborations could unlock new audiences and create cross-cultural experiences that go beyond what a single workshop can do.

The common thread? Creating learning that is both rooted in local realities and scalable across contexts. For Anand, expanding reach goes hand-in-hand with creating meaningful experiences that participants carry forward into their lives and work.

Wrapping up: Purpose needs a platform

The mission behind ProjectCHAKRA is powerful. Anand is helping create the kind of learning that changes lives. Each workshop offers a doorway into someone else’s world, inviting participants to engage with real-life challenges and reflect on how they respond to them. The ripple effects of this kind of learning are hard to overstate. But to keep making those ripples, and to turn them into waves, requires a foundation that can carry the weight of ambition.

“We’re very connected to why we’re doing what we’re doing… the success feedback isn’t completely driven by the revenue.”

Anand’s clarity of purpose is inspiring. Yet even the most heartfelt mission needs architecture around it. Without systems to deliver, track, and refine that mission, it becomes harder to scale its impact. The next chapter for ProjectCHAKRA focuses on deepening the quality of each experience while also expanding their reach to amplify long-term impact.

That starts with choosing to build the platform the mission deserves. It’s a long-term effort grounded in sustainability and built with legacy in mind.